‘Tis the season again! With graduation ceremonies around the corner, many colleges are looking for interactive graduation ideas to share the ceremony through social media. After all, a graduation is the perfect time to boost your students’ engagement.
Here are 3 tips to make your College Graduation Engagement ceremony more interactive and enhance your other education marketing efforts:
1. Create a hashtag for the college event: Hashtags can be used for Twitter and Instagram, allowing you and everyone following the hashtag to share stories about your event. NYU used the hashtag #CongratagradNYU to have families and friends congratulate their graduates. There is no need to have your Graduation ceremony at the Yankees Stadium like NYU to make it fun!
A simple screen in the graduation arena/auditorium can be fun to add memories to the ceremony. The University of Central Oklahoma used the TweetBeam feature and thus tripled the engagement from last fall.
This new way of visualizing Twitter loads tweets live from Twitter on one page that can be customized by creating walls for any topic. (In the example below, the keywords were “queensu2013” for Queens University’s 2013 Convocation.)
2. Ask your students to tag themselves: Ask students and attendees to use your specific hashtag to share pictures of the event on Twitter and Instagram. Then, feature the shared images on Facebook and ask your grads to tag themselves.
The University of Southern California posted hundreds of photos on its Facebook account within hours of the ceremony, ending with the simple message, “Congrats to all our 2013 graduates! These photos were collected from this year’s USC grad social media campaign.
Do you see yourself or your friends here? Tag them in your comments and give them a big “fight on!” Everyone started liking, tagging, and commenting immediately, keeping the party going long after the ceremony.
New tools are now available to allow attendees to tag themselves in very large crowds. Boston University decided to use Giga Tag, enabling users to tag themselves and share shots with their communities. Here is a peek at Boston University’s graduation ceremony Giga Tag.
3. Share your graduates’ personal stories on video that will be played at the ceremony: A common question is, How do you make a good graduation ceremony? In the weeks leading up to graduation, Boston College featured interviews with seniors about to graduate. They then created a video series, Class of Seniors to Remember. It’s a great way to connect and bring electricity to your ceremony.
What will you do this year to make your college’s graduation ceremony more interactive?
FAQ To Consider
How do you make a good graduation ceremony?
In the weeks leading up to graduation, Boston College featured interviews with seniors about to graduate. They then created a video series, Class of Seniors to Remember. It’s a great way to connect and bring electricity to your ceremony.
